RUMBLE STUDIO, Denari, Predock, Sharif

NEWS

The 401 Techcore design studio is intended to unite the focused material and fabrication aspects of the Technology Seminar with the comprehensive design effort of the traditional Core Studio. As the culmination of the first year studio progression from form to plan, and now to section, the Techcore Studio sees the continuity of intimacy and analysis with case studies; a similar course structure of precedent-problem-project; yet it works within a highly collaborative mode to achieve an ambitious year-end exhibition of scale models and drawings.

Architecture needs to be adjusting constantly to remain culturally relevant. The “wall” or envelope of architecture is a mechanism that has the profound capacity to re-adjust to cultural shifts. Recent emphasis on the material and computational aspects of building envelopes have produced a compelling array of types and expressions, and an almost infinite (and at times stupefying) quantity of variable parametric controls. These “digital” projects have tended to focus on the frontal surface as a muscular receptacle while neglecting an equally potent set of suppressed material logics that lie behind this surface (both literally and conceptually).

Through the careful work and analysis of important case studies of experimental modernist houses in our own backyard, students will reveal latent potentials for formal expression, material dynamics, and new modes of composition that re-gain contemporary relevance. Student projects will extend, swerve, complete, re-appropriate, etc. these tendencies revealed in modernist precedents into novel sectional organizations. A primary intention of this studio is to synthesize these layers such that an equal emphasis is placed on the integration and exploitation of those layers that are traditionally suppressed. These wall sections will ultimately be tested through the drawing and fabrication of large-scale representations that organize the material, geometric, technical and structural ingredients with synthesized, demonstrable effects.